Gratifying as it is to find this intimate West End space back in business, I wish it could have relaunched with something better than this tawdry, derivative American thriller by Gardner McKay. It belongs to that dubious school, pioneeered by William Mastrosimone's Extremities in 1984, in which a cornered female exacts revenge on a male predator; but it is one of those schools from which it is best to play truant.

McKay's heroine, Maude, is a psychoanalyst who lives alone high in the LA hills. Lately, she has been dealing with victims of a serial attacker whose peculiarity is not to kill women but to make love to them and then lobotomise them. Given her direct experience, it seems a trifle bizarre that Maude admits into her home a gangling giggler, Peter, who has just fixed her car. What follows is a brutal cat-and-mouse game in which the prowling Peter first takes on the role of aggressor and then becomes Maude's passive plaything.

Like most plays of this kind, McKay's tries to have it both ways. It titillates us with the prospect of violence and appeals to our voyeuristic instincts by showing the two characters having vigorous rumpy-pumpy behind a transparent screen. At the same time, it goes in for all kinds of dated, Dirty-Harry moralising about a loaded criminal justice system: "The more inhumane the crime, the more humane the punishment," we are loftily told.

Admittedly, this sadistic rubbish comes smoothly packaged in William Scoular's production and I have no quarrel with the performances of Alice Krige as the vengeful analyst or Al Weaver as her would-be tormentor. But 50 years ago precisely this theatre was offering a Peter Hall-directed double-bill by Jean Anouilh. Now all it can come up with is a needless American import that yields only ennui.